@JoyVoid I've been excited about the coworking/neighborhood event vibe that SF has been giving off lately!

Publicly listing salaries - not that unusual actually

Internally listing all flows of money? Money is one main unit of decisionmaking in organizations, and knowing how things functions should help employees better understand the priorities of the org.

@SG Haha I like this framing! Probably I'd have to unlearn the myth around the indie hacker; I used to idolize people like Dean Herbert, Daisuke Amaya, etc who created really cool programs from scratch on their own. I still look out for such examples (Evan Wallace and the guy behind mmm.page come to mind), but I've shifted in the direction of "figuring out how to make it possible for people to collaborate is super, super important, and all the most important things are done in teams"

@JamesGrugett Well, "all billionaire EA donors" is already a pretty decent TAM, I want to say - I think Open Phil, FTX, and SFF together distribute hundreds of millions a year? So I'd just focus on nailing that first.

But anyways, scaling in my head looks something like "billionaire EA => all of charity => replacing for-profit equity => all government spending". Maybe can swap 3 and 4.

@ahalekelly Hm... Overall, pretty rarely. I think most of us are free-speech advocates. That said:

• If something is illegal eg child porn

• If the market or user is making things a lot worse for the community at large? <= this is super fuzzy, idk

@JamesGrugett

• Users are complaining all the time

• The media calls this prediction market thing a fad or a toy

• We're getting sued for a lot of money

@Conflux "The probability represents the 'price' of a YES ticket. At 65%, you pay 65 cents for a ticket that gives you $1 if YES happens. But the more tickets you buy, the more expensive the next one becomes - causing the probability to shift."

Oh very interesting! I think they often have a fairly charismatic person at the center, along with a set of devout followers, packaging together a values and processes that happen to congeal very well. The movements I'm personally familiar with...

• The Catholic Church

• Anime/Manga

• Magic: The Gathering

• Rationality/EA?

I guess a litmus test for whether the movement has hit "success" is when there's a conference for it, haha.

Anyways I don't really have great answers, but think it's really important (esp at a community-driven company like Manifold!)

Right now? the amount of programming I'm able to do on any particular day -- it's actually quite frustrating how few lines of code I touch now.

I could see this ending up with me either dropping "coding" from my role altogether, and spending it more on product specs/management/process; or going into hermit mode and just coding for a solid month...

Haha intention is definitely to become profitable, but something we're deliberately not focusing on (for example, recurring M$ purchase would be pretty low-hanging fruit if we wanted to push a bit harder on that.)

I'd guess we'd aim for profitability sometime after Series A, and maybe after Series B? So like 1 to 3 years down the line, at a minimum. I'm especially not worried about "how" - it'd be really hard to imagine a world where people are actually using mana but the ecosystem isn't generating profits. Simple proposals:

• Take a % cut of transactions, or withdrawals (Predictit/Kalshi model)

• Earn net interest on the amount our users have deposited (Charles Schwab model)

• Sell private instances of Manifold to corporations (the Github model)

But again, I could be wildly wrong about these, and the fact is we don't care that much atm

@Sjlver I think yes! Good intersection of "leans into my skillset/comparative advantage", "plausible path to saving the world", "neglected area", "pretty fun day to day".

One neat trick is that whenever I find something that could be a plausibly better thing to do with my life, I just fold the thing into our startup. E.g. taking on disqus, substack, discord, ethereum, etc. It's called Manifold, after all, not Monofold.

Fear: Probably any question whose truthful answer would make me look like a bad person, reduce my social standing, etc. Monkey brain cares a lot about status.

Refuse to answer: mostly anything that would break an obligation I have to someone else, either an explicit or implied secret

I don't even really know what a Rambo is -- some kind of military person from a movie? I'll guess the 3 Rambos, since I do have at least a mild arachnophobia and my guess is bodyweight matters a lot when fighting unarmed

Hm interesting thought, though I'm not sure that this kind of slippage/price impact is especially causing a lot of user confusion at the moment, so I wouldn't really prioritize this. Plus it makes a transition to a real-money system in the future much, much harder...

I think Challenge Bets would be a better use case if you're looking for something like this?

@JamesGrugett Challenge rating: very variable

Something like "get a lot better at executing", involving "developing better product taste across the whole team" and "tighter feedback loops between the core team and users", with a smattering of "better team communications".

Random ideas I have (warning, probably very bad)

• New feature freeze for a month, only work on polish and code refactoring

• Drop Discord altogether and force ourselves to get Manifold Groups chat good enough to use

• Block Manifold on Desktop so that we make mobile good enough to use

• Backend migration, for real - our pages are just really slow now, and clunky backends/dev processes make future innovation harder

The harder question is "is PMF the right thing to focus on?" and my answer is "eh, maybe not?" Specifically: our current product might be close to a local maxima, and significant pivots may be needed to get us out. E.g.:

• Move into real money?

• Develop a smart contract plugin ecosystem, through mana?

• Build better Wikipedia?

@JamesGrugett I'm not even sure I agree with or understand the premise, I wouldn't say that we have strong privacy norms? In my view, strong privacy norms would look something like "data leakage is taken seriously and tracked and punished automatically". Out of the possible views on privacy, I think modern society's is pretty weak.

If the question is more like "why does modern society have stronger norms on privacy than Austin seems to think is good" then I'd answer some combination inertia, fear of the unknown, laziness.

Inertia because humans are coming from a place where information is scarce, hard to record, and hard to spread, and norms evolved in an ecosystem that is now very different than the ecosystem we live in today.

Fear of the unknown, because people just don't really see how things could be different; they see the costs of losing privacy but not the benefits

Laziness because making things transparent sometimes takes some amount of work still, and defaults matter a lot.

(Challenge rating: 6/10?)

@SG Uh First and foremost I can't tell if anyone has actually seriously tried. Maybe that means I haven't done enough research, but also frankly if I have to do a lot of research I think it means that the microtransaction people have been failing at promoting themselves.

Next, something around regulation? (or the fear of regulation, which seems to cast a much wider chilling effect than regulation itself)

Human psychology also plays a big part; "free" will almost always beat "paid", and "frictionless" will beat "have to do literally anything". I think the solution there is to bake in more of the "microtransacting" into the system itself, eg the way Spotify pays per stream?

Also, microtransactions seem to be pretty unimaginative, mostly limited to direct payments to each other. There are so many more interesting economic models to play with (lotteries! quadratic funding! various tax schemes!); so "just too boring" is one possible answer that would be especially good for Manifold.

Microtransactions seem to do well in game economies, I think Kingdom of Loathing or Runescape are some of my go-to favorite examples. Another example I like are certain webcomic forums, like Order of the Stick or Erfworld, with their tipping culture.

(Challenge rating: ~6/10?)

@JoyVoid Off the top of my head:

• Software in EA, in general

• "Tools for thought"

• "Improving Institutional Decision Making" aka making orgs smarter, or making smarter orgs. Across the level of teams, companies, and movements (eg EA). Maybe cities/states/nations sometime later

• Examining how social structures and events lead to more or less happiness/utility/productivity

• Fertility in the first world - it's tragic that our wealthiest nations also see the fewest number of new kids being born

(Challenge rating: 2/10? It's a good question though!)

(for context, my timelines are kind of EA-partyline-short, ~10years)

@SG Probably not, if I'm understanding you correctly.

I think directly setting up markets/certs on alignment wouldn't be that fruitful right now:

• because nobody knows what's going on with alignment anyways;

• because we (Manifold, and also society at large) don't know how to use prediction markets or impact certs in a useful way.

I think the best thing Manifold can be do would be to solve the latter problem - finding fun, useful, high-value, accurate, decision-relevant ways to coordinate information between people through markets/economics.

As of right now, I would set up alignment-related markets only insofar as they're good testing grounds for the mechanisms (e.g. because a lot of our audience cares about it), but my guess is that we're still 3-12 months off from Manifold being directly useful on making the alignment field better.

(Challenge rating: 6.5/10?)

@JoyVoid I'm a pretty headstrong person, in general. Since founding Manifold, people seem less ready/willing to call me out on my BS, but getting tough questions feels like it's pretty important for course correcting.

(also, I tend to like novelty for the sake of novelty, lol)

Challenge rating: 5/10? More than I had expected actually!